Marcus nodded, reaching for the deeply buried memory of the challenging conversations in which he had for a long time felt more an audience than a participant, as the old man had outlined his own beliefs and values.
‘Yes.’
‘Then you know only too well that to turn your face from this crime will not stand. Only in Rome will you find the men who must be punished for our deaths.’
The darkness was deepening around his family with stealthy inevitability now, and his brother was utterly lost to view. Even as he stared at his mother with a longing to hear her voice one last time, she too sank back into the gloom, leaving only his father’s near invisible presence on the couch before him.
‘Only in Rome, Marcus. .’
He woke with a start, and Felicia stirred from her sleep alongside him, her voice edged with concern.
‘What is it?’
Marcus put an arm around her, cupping a breast in the way they usually lay before sleep came for them both.
‘It was the dream again. Nothing more. .’
Her body tensed against his.
‘My love. .’
He kissed her ear with a gentle smile.
‘I know. I remember your diagnosis. My sleeping mind has found some way to subvert the control I have established over my emotions, and is using images from my former life to conduct some manner of grieving that I cannot indulge in any other way. Although I expect that a priest would tell me that the dreams are sent by Morpheus at the behest of Mithras, who would have me follow a soldier’s path to take my revenge.’
She snorted softly into the room’s darkness and reached over her shoulder to tap his forehead.
‘The problem lurks in here, my love. You must allow yourself to mark the passing of your family in an appropriate manner. Until you do you will continue to be haunted by these ghosts from your previous life, the life you have not yet fully allowed to die.’
He kissed her neck, squeezing his body against her back.
‘I know. I will, when the time is right. .’ He cupped the other breast, rubbing his fingers gently across her nipples. ‘And now, given that the baby is still asleep. .’
Later, as they lay together listening to the sounds of the camp coming to life, he held her tightly and mused inwardly upon the dream, just as he had done before several other dawns along the length of the empire’s northern frontier.
‘Mark the passing of my family in an appropriate manner? Never was a truer word spoken, my love. But the time and place is not here and now, it will be at some time in the future which is not yet clear to me. But the time will come, of that I am quite sure. And the place?’ His father’s words from the dream echoed in his mind. ‘Only in Rome. .’
‘So we’ve marched all this way to protect a fucking mountain?’ The Fifth Century’s standard bearer glanced around at the peaks to either side of the road and spat in front of his boots. ‘Gods below, but we attract every shitty job going, don’t we? Got a cold, wet quarry that needs watching in case some stray barbarians fancy carrying off the stone? Just send the bloody Tungrians, they’re stupid enough to do anything they’re told!’
He shook his head, changing hands on his standard’s shaft.
‘We can only hope they’ve got a decent whorehouse up there, or we’ll have come all this way to no purpose whatsoever. Mind you. .’ Shaking his head ruefully, he glanced back at his audience, the column of men marching four abreast behind him. ‘The sort of woman who’s made it this far into the mountains isn’t likely to be big on the softer side of the profession. And I really hate it when the mattress thrasher sucking my cock can tickle my balls with her beard.’
Marcus shook his head at his standard bearer’s diatribe as he marched up the road alongside the stocky veteran, resolving as ever not to rise to the older man’s habitual bitter complaint at any hint of hardship. Eighteen months as Morban’s centurion had taught him that while the twenty-five-year veteran could be silenced for a moment or two, he rarely relinquished the subject of his ire for very long. One of the soldiers slogging along in the ranks behind them raised his voice from the safe anonymity of the men around him to further provoke the standard bearer.
‘There’ll be no proper beer neither, eh Morban?’
Catching Marcus’s glare the standard bearer wisely held back his reply, tipping his head to listen for the sound he expected and softly counting down as he waited.
‘Five, four, three, two-’
An incensed bellow from behind them made both men start, despite the fact they had both been expecting it. Marcus exchanged a glance with Morban as Quintus, his chosen man, unleashed a tirade of irritated abuse in the general direction of the anonymous soldier.
‘I’ve a bloody good idea which one of you apes opened his mouth just then, and when I find out exactly who it was you’ll be wishin’ you never joined up! I’ll have you on extra duties for so long your dick will have withered away before you get to do anything better with it than play jerk the gherkin! I’ll break my fuckin’ pole on your back, and then I’ll-’
‘Call for another one, will you Quintus?’
The standard bearer’s voice was quiet enough that only Marcus heard him, and the chosen man bellowed his challenge into the cold mountain air.
‘I’ll fuckin’ call for another one! That’s what I’ll do!’
The standard bearer smirked at his officer.
‘That’s five times today. Morban wins again.’
Ignoring his centurion’s raised eyebrow, he cleared his throat and put an end to his colleague’s tirade by roaring out the first line of a marching song that had been sung a lot over the previous few weeks, as the Tungrian cohorts had marched the length of the empire’s northern frontier along the Rhenus and Danubius rivers.
‘I got five by selling my cloak. .’
He paused momentarily to allow the century’s soldiers to join in, drowning out their chosen man’s indignant voice as they belted out the song in fine style.
‘. . five more by selling my spear,
the final five by selling my shield,
that’s fifteen fucks, my dear!’
He winked at his centurion as the men behind them drew breath for the song’s chorus, and Marcus was unable to resist a wry smile in return. His standard bearer and chosen man were at daggers drawn for most of the time, and Morban took any and every opportunity to get the advantage in their uneasy relationship.
‘Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve,
eleven fucks, my dear,
and when we get to ten fucks,
then I’m stopping for a beer!’
Marcus stopped marching and stepped off the road, watching the passing soldiers with his hands on the hilts of the swords that had long since earned him the nickname ‘Two Knives’. The cohort’s centuries ground wearily past him up the long road, whose course twisted and undulated with the valley’s floor as it climbed towards the mist-covered peaks that were their objective for the day.
‘Having fun yet, young ’un?’
Nodding in reply to his colleague Otho’s greeting, and laughing at the wink that creased the older man’s seamed and battered face as the cohort’s Seventh Century marched past, Marcus stretched his back as he looked down the column’s length. Taking a moment to enjoy the sun’s warmth on his face, he pushed his shoulders back and rotated his head to work out some of the stiffness in his neck. His body, already wiry with corded muscle from the effort of routinely carrying fifty pounds of weapons and armour on his back day after day, had been exercised to the point of perfection by three months on the long road from Fortress Bonna in Germania Inferior. He looked around him at the towering hills on every side of the road’s long straight ribbon, shading his brown eyes against the afternoon sun with a long-fingered hand and musing on the mountainous land around them for a long moment before his reverie was interrupted.